(1) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to portable telephone devices and in particular to portable telephone devices equipped with a lighting device for better viewability of a display panel in a dark place.
(2) Description of the Related Art
Generally, portable telephone devices are equipped with a lighting device at a display panel and an operation unit for better operability in the nighttime or dark places. These lighting devices have a function of lighting up the display panel or the like for a predetermined period of time in response to users' key operations. This function is effective also when making use of a contents information distribution service in the open air and nighttime. With the contents information distribution service, users can make a request for contents information on news, weather forecasts, or the like, from a server and receive the contents information distributed from the server.
Note here that a server denotes all information disseminating servers such as a Web server, mail server, and data base server, which are connected with a network capable of two-way communication (e.g., the Internet) and a communication terminal equipment such as a portable telephone device, can make a request for information and receive the same through the server.
In the above case, upon receipt of an instruction for requesting distribution of contents information through key operation by a user, the lighting device lights up the display panel in a portable telephone device for a given period of time. Therefore, when the portable telephone device receives the contents information distributed from the server, the user can see the display panel and recognize that the requested contents information has been received even in the dark at nighttime.
However, if requests for contents information from many users' portable telephone devices are made for the server at a same time, standby time for connecting with the server would be longer, and therefore it takes a long time to receive the requested contents information from the server. Such a case causes a problem that the portable telephone device cannot receive the contents information within the given period of time for lighting up the display panel, but at the time when the contents information is received, the lighting has gone out. This leads to the situation where the user cannot read the contents information even though the contents information is displayed on the display panel.